2.2       The Human Development Report 1994

The Human Development Report 1994 argued as follows:

  The concept of security has for too long been interpreted narrowly: as security of territory from external aggression, or as protection of national interests in foreign policy or as global security from the threat of a nuclear holocaust. It has been related more to nation-states than to people … who sought security in their daily lives. For many of them, security symbolizes protection from the threat of disease, hunger, unemployment, crime, social conflict, political repression and environmental hazards.                                        (UNDP 1994: 22)

The threats to security listed here were deliberately chosen to reflect seven distinct categories of human insecurity (health, food, economic, personal, community, political and environmental) and to show that the concept being proposed was “all-encompassing” and directed towards “freedom from fear” as well as “freedom from want” (ibid: 24). This definition of security was therefore “people-centered” and “universal”, and consisted of “interdependent” components.  To establish this concept “through early prevention”, the report advocated the use of early warning indicators of human distress such as crime rates, road traffic accidents, pollution, and income inequality (ibid: 30).  These indicators are now regularly included in annual issues of the UNDP Human Development Report.

The UNDP definition of human security was put up for discussion at the Copenhagen Social Summit in 1995, but no formal consensus was reached.  Although the conference declarations included a commitment to "promoting social integration by fostering societies that are stable, safe and just", the proposed human security definition was perceived at the Summit as too broad, too idealistic, and as threatening traditional concepts of national security.  The negotiations concentrated on striking a balance between national sovereignty and global action: the EU countries argued for increased leverage on national policies in the name of social development, while the G-77 countries held firmly to the importance of “territorial integrity and non-interference” which the universal and all-encompassing elements of human security appeared to undermine. (Earth Negotiations Bulletin, IISD 1995)

2.3     The contribution of Canada and Japan

Since 1995, the leading contributor to the human security dialogue has been the government of Canada, which has incorporated a safety-oriented definition of human security into its official foreign policy objectives. The Canadian approach (see Box 2.2) owes a great deal to the 1994 UNDP conceptualization, especially in terms of the focus on individuals and the threats they face.  A summary document published by the Department for Foreign Affairs states that “the litmus test for determining if it is useful to frame an issue in human security terms is the degree to which the safety of people is at risk.” (Govt. of Canada 1999: 5)

The Canadian and UNDP approaches to human security both arrive at human security from dissatisfaction with traditional national security perspectives, and they both stress a mutually reinforcing relationship between human security and human development with clear implications for active policy:

Human security provides an enabling environment for human development. Where violence or the threat of violence makes meaningful progress on the developmental agenda impractical, enhancing safety for people is a prerequisite.                                                                                                                                                      (ibid: 7)

In the context of war and civil conflict, the Canadian emphasis on population safety takes on specific international policy implications.  Key policy targets in the realm of preventive diplomacy have included the Ottawa Convention on Anti-personnel Landmines and the Rome Treaty for the creation of an International Criminal Court.  These two initiatives, as well as an expressed interest in strengthening international humanitarian intervention, reveal the sense in which the Canadians may place higher priority on protecting the human security of individuals and groups than on shoring up national sovereignty.

The Japanese vision of human security acknowledges the increasingly important role of individuals and non-state actors but places most emphasis on establishing human security through enlightened national strategies aimed at promoting economic development and individual self-reliance.  In a recent policy speech, the Japanese State Secretary for Foreign Affairs noted that the trend towards thinking within a human security framework

. . . does not in the least diminish the significance of the state as the basic component of international society; states will of course continue to retain their territorial sovereignty, democratic legitimacy, and enforcement power under the law.  But it is becoming increasingly important to address these challenges to human dignity from the standpoint of protecting the interests of individual human beings, with each individual exerting his or her own initiative. 

                                                                                                                                                      (Takemi 1999)

International projects proposed under the Japanese umbrella of human security include extension of micro-credit schemes; promotion of basic education; provision of social safety nets to vulnerable populations within Asia; support for conflict prevention and post-conflict reconstruction through economic development and reconciliation efforts; and the establishment of a human security fund administered through the UN to support a range of economic assistance measures.  (ibid.)

In summary, the Canadian approach to human security defines one view of the discussion in the international arena about the priority to attach to issues of population protection in war and complex emergencies.  The Japanese approach acknowledges acute insecurity crises but offers a strategy aimed at economic development and conflict prevention.

2.4     The King/Murray approach, and the UN Millenium Report

One problem associated with an approach to human security that hovers close to traditional development strategies is that it may fail to capture the important psychosocial elements of vulnerability and resilience.  This problem is also evident in those discussions that equate insecurity with some inverse measure of poverty, albeit adjusted for risk or weighted in other ways. In a paper entitled “Rethinking Human Security”, Gary King and Christopher Murray proposed a “simple, rigorous and measurable definition of human security” expressed as: the expected number of years of future life spent outside the state of ‘generalized poverty’. Generalized poverty occurs when an individual falls below the threshold in any key domain of human well-being.             

                                                                                                           (King and Murray 2000)

The important step involved here is the inclusion of a lifetime perspective, which is necessary for any conceptualization of security that addresses vulnerability over time, but the authors advance the idea through the device of an aggregate human security index, a device also proposed in the background papers to the 2000 UN Millenium Report.  The difficulty with a single outcome measure of this sort is that it may be so close to a weighted poverty measure or an aggregated development index that it cannot identify the particular components of current and acute threats to well-being, or to recognize short run changes in risk and vulnerability. Nonetheless, the idea of a ‘single indicator’ is discussed by many people and occupies a significant portion of the current debate on human security.

2.5     Human security indicators: the direction from here?

Looking back, there seems to be great consensus on the value of the human security approach but little agreement on what that approach should entail. The Millenium Report argued for “a more human-centred approach to security” but did not offer a formal definition of how this should be articulated or measured.  (UN 2000:43) Looking ahead, the challenge is to build a definition of human security that can be translated into a measurable set of indicators in the field – that is, indicators for assessing risk and vulnerability at the individual and community level.

2.6     Summary

There have been several different important approaches to understanding human security. Each has distinctive advantages and disadvantages, but all share a core focus on individuals and communities rather than states and nations, on social and psychological well-being as well as provision for material needs. Most also stress an instrumental role for human security in promoting or enabling human development.

These common core elements have several immediate implications. First, if human security and national security are closely linked then individual and group insecurity may threaten the security of the nation state itself; therefore, national policy makers have an acute interest in understanding human security. Secondly, if the security of one state is linked to another, the international community has a similarly increased interest in promoting the human security – that is, in promoting the security of citizens the world over.

In the following section we propose a working definition of human security that acknowledges these subtle changes. We begin to build a framework for national and international policy making that will support an improved capacity for monitoring human security and for intervening – when necessary – to protect vulnerable communities and to ease recovery from crisis and conflict. We continue to focus on the individual and on the close links between human security and human development. We stress the need to go beyond material needs analysis by recognizing the critical psychological and social components of personal and community resilience, and we stress the need to be proactive rather than reactive in recognizing the signs of insecurity.

3.  A New Definition of Human Security

Outline of the Argument

In this section we move forward the general observations of Section 2 and lay out a new conceptual approach to human security. We begin by asking what type of concept we need, and argue for a composite, capability-based concept that includes both material and psychosocial resources. We then look at the content of the human security idea and attempt to say what we think those resources are. We focus almost exclusively on the psychosocial side, where we identify three overlapping domains and three connected indicators of security. In the final part, we summarize our arguments and propose an appropriate working definition.

overview: Human Security requires a composite bundle of basic resources

The concept of human security developed here deliberately includes the social, psychological, political, and economic factors that promote and protect human well being through time.  Its key components reflect not only the need to ensure human survival at any point in time, but also the need to sustain and develop a core psychological coping capacity in populations under stress. Eventually, a conceptualization that addresses these dual needs will provide policy guidance in two areas:

        a)  how to secure minimum levels of survival (with water, food and shelter) and provide minimum levels of protection from life threats;

        b)  how to support basic psychosocial needs for identity, recognition, participation, and autonomy.

We believe that to secure these two components of human security is also to secure an essential platform for human development.  In other words, we see human security as establishing the floor, the starting point from which human development efforts then push off.  Concentrating on a secure base offers immediate benefits in terms of threat management and economic stability, and also stands to improve the effectiveness of long term development efforts.  For a human being to have human security, he or she must have a bundle of basic resources, both material and psychosocial, that constitute an indivisible set of necessary inputs and conditions for stability and well-being.  This bundle has to be achieved before human beings can be expected to be receptive to or capable of participating in any development strategy.  In short, human security must be attained prior to and as a pre-condition for the successful implementation of a human development strategy.  (See Graphic 3.1)

3.1     Capabilities, coping, and vulnerability

We argued above that human security should be thought of as a composite, capability-based concept.  We begin here by tracing the conceptual connection to the capabilities approach in development economics. This approach, first outlined in the context of ‘social security’ by Jean Drèze and Amartya Sen, stressed the importance of social functionings as well as biological health.  Drèze and Sen argued that to lead a secure life people relied on appropriate psychological as well as material relationships. Specifically:

[T]he object of public action can be seen to be the enhancement of the capability of people to undertake valuable and valued ‘doings and beings’. This can extend from such elementary capabilities as the ability to avoid undernourishment and related morbidity and mortality, to more sophisticated social capabilities such as taking part in the life of the community and achieving self-respect.

                                                                                                                                      Dreze and Sen 1989: 12

This statement appears to endorse the fulfillment of basic psychosocial needs as an early and crucial part of the human development progression, and we have followed this approach in our own thinking about human security.  It is important to note the main features of the argument we have drawn from and to include in the overview the clear links we see to the closely related concepts of coping and vulnerability.

Capabilities

The capabilities approach relies on an Aristotelian concept of human functioning, which in its modern form is discussed as the capability of an individual to attain a minimum standard of living or other desired development outcome. Focusing on capacity to function rather than on the simple provision of goods allows us to develop a flexible analytic process: since individuals and local circumstances differ, the inputs required to secure an acceptable standard will also differ.  Drèze and Sen conclude:

The focus on capability helps to clarify the purpose of public action. The object is not so much to provide a particular amount of food for each. … A more reasoned goal would be to make it possible for all to have the capability to avoid undernourishment and escape deprivations. … The focus here is on human life, as it can be led, rather than on commodities as such.

                                                                                                                                                              (ibid.: 13)

Coping & vulnerability

This background is important if we are to understand recent treatments of vulnerability. Patrick Webb has discussed ways to prepare individuals to function effectively when threatened with internal or external hazard, and deploys the notion of ‘coping’ to arrive at a similar theoretical stance.  Webb maintains that vulnerability to disaster should not be thought of as an absolute state or condition, but rather as the combined impact of a threat and the possible adaptive reactions it provokes. He suggests a schematic definition along the lines of

{VULNERABILITY}  =   {HAZARD}     –      {COPING}

where it is intended to capture the idea that vulnerability can be expressed as the net impact of the hazards one faces offset by the mechanisms one has for coping with them. (Webb 2000: 35-6)  Such coping mechanisms can be seen as contributing to what Drèze and Sen call one’s capacity to function.  (This connection is most strong when coping mechanisms are considered in their most positive forms--those that encourage constructive attachments and generative economic behavior--and it is in this light that we construe the concept throughout this paper.)

This line of thinking about hazards and coping mechanisms has an interesting and important implication. If vulnerability results when exposure to hazard is high and when an individual or group’s coping capacity is poorly developed, then vulnerability is in some sense the inverse of security. The significance of this is more than mere semantics: Webb’s simple equation shows that the level of vulnerability (or insecurity) depends positively on the scale of hazard, but negatively on the level of coping. If our objective is to assess vulnerability, then we find ourselves on the lookout for the absence of coping strategies, just as much as – traditionally – we have searched for the presence of hazards and threats. Webb summarizes:

Assessing vulnerability is like trying to measure something that is not there. It is an absence of security, basic needs, social protection, political power and coping options that defines the problem and makes the search for a visible reference point a difficult task.                                                                                           

                                                                                                                                      (Webb 2000: 36)

This argument offers direction for the measurement and monitoring of human security. We must do more than theorize about the nature of security: we must be able to recognize and identify situations that support it, and – as this section has argued – situations that do not.  (See Box 3.1)  As we move into discussion of the core components of security, we will refer back to the idea of measuring absence and will actively develop the idea of a ‘negative indicator’; that is, an indicator that rises when security collapses.

3.2     Content: the core components of human security

Human security has two kinds of component: minimum material inputs to sustain survival and core psychosocial supports.  Our discussion at this stage focuses on the latter, simply because the former has been extensively explored and developed elsewhere. (Clay and Stokke 2000)  When we set out our recommendations for application (Annex A), we necessarily include both elements, but at this stage the most important task is to explain and underscore the importance of basic psychosocial needs. 

Basic psychosocial needs

As Peter Marris has noted, linking psychology and social science in the study of human behavior has not been a customary part of the academic exercise:

Our theories of human behavior split into largely independent systems of thought:  psychology and social science. . . . We rarely explore the interaction between each unique human actor and the social systems of which she or he is part.  Yet, surely this interaction ought to be at the foundation of any theory of human behavior.  How can we begin to understand ourselves except as creatures of the societies from which we learned the language itself to think about ourselves?  And how can we understand society except as a network of patterns of relationship which each of us is constantly engaged in creating, reproducing, and changing?  We need a way of thinking about the interaction between unique human beings and the social relationships they form, not only because our theories are crippled without it, but because without it we cannot articulate clearly many of the gravest causes of social distress.  (Marris 1991)

Those engaged in the work of promoting human development and economic development have long been concerned with how people behave and how their behavior can be influenced in ways that foster or enhance individual and group well being.  Drawing from insights in psychology, it would seem that to understand human behavior in any context, including periods of crisis and transition, it is necessary to look to see whether certain basic human needs, psychological and social, are being met.  A vast literature on this topic is succinctly integrated in Sam Amoo’s discussion of ethnic conflict in Africa, where he lists four basic psychosocial needs – for identity, recognition, participation, and autonomy.  (See Box 3.2).

A few definitions:[2]  Identity, at the level of the individual, means that a person knows who he is; knows where he came from socially and geographically; can lay adequate claim to a history and a set of possessions; and can prove or establish these facts without much fear of challenge from external groups or authorities.  Recognition is the certainty that these facts of existence and history are acknowledged and accepted by others within a network of family and social relationships.  Recognition confers dignity.  Participation, for the individual, is the opportunity and capacity to engage with others in economic, political, or social relationships, networks, and enterprises.  Autonomy, an attribute of empowered being and standing in the world, speaks to a person’s ability to determine his own path, independently think about and shape his own future, and resist confinement in subject, victim, or passive modes.

Critics of the development perspective (going back to Franz Fanon, 1963) have increasingly come to realize that fulfilling these basic psychological and social needs is essential to the collective mission of the state.  If the state, or the public sector, cannot meet these needs, people will seek fulfillment elsewhere, leading to potentially divisive and disruptive consequences, ranging from individual alienation, the rise of ‘horizontally’ competing subgroups, or outright civil conflict.  (Stewart 1998) Yet as relevant and compelling as these ideas may be to people active in humanitarian and development work, the major difficulty has been one of translation and implementation.  How do we frame and package ideas about psychological and social needs into strategic and operational parameters for planning and action in the field?  Further, how can this be done to good effect in a cross-cultural context or in societies torn by war for generations?  We clearly need to do more than identify the importance of the psychosocial domain: we need to suggest specifically how an overarching concept of human security might incorporate these issues into a framework, and how that framework can be practically applied to policy and operations.

3.3.1  The three psychosocial domains of human security

The four basic human needs for identity, recognition, participation, and autonomy can be seen as involving core connections to self, to others, and to a sense of time.  In an attempt to move from the level of concept to the level of practical assessment, we sought to find perceptible aspects of human relationships that would tell us whether or not these basic human needs were being met.  In this way we arrived at three key relationship areas that capture the main meanings of identity, recognition, participation, and autonomy. These areas or domains of psychosocial relationships can be grouped under three headings:

(1)    Relationships with location (a sustainable sense of home and safety; providing identity, recognition, and freedom from fear)

(2)    Relationships with community (a network of constructive social or family support; providing identity, recognition, participation, and autonomy)

(3)    Relationships with time (an acceptance of the past and a positive grasp of the future; providing identity, recognition, participation, and autonomy)

These three sets of relationships overlap and reinforce each other: having a sense of home allows one to feel linked to a geographic and social community, as does knowing something about one’s history, and so on.  The fact that the three areas overlap does not detract from their usefulness as independent categories of understanding and assessing the human condition, or the condition of human security.  In fact, we believe that these categories support a more rigorous analytic approach, and that they will – eventually – facilitate preemptive measurement. We first explain why this is the case, and then show how each category contributes to the working definition of human security.

Psychosocial domain #1 – Sense of Home/Attachment to Place

The numbers of people who are no longer home in this world is vast.  In terms of ‘voluntary’ economic migration, millions of people have been moved from their traditional lands to make way for large development projects and at least 70 million people have left their countries of origin to seek work elsewhere.  (Weiner 1995)  Forced (‘involuntary’) migration is a constant phenomenon in the history of disaster and war.  In Africa, one can trace community disruptions and displacement back to the great ravages of the slave trade.  In recent years, the international community has found its resources stretched by attempting to meet the needs of millions of people who have been driven from their homes through some mix of political oppression, drought and famine, and communal strife or civil war.  In 1999, approximately 14 million people are refugees, another estimated 21 million people are internally displaced within the borders of their own countries, and an unknown number of people are trapped, in place, in circumstances that have suddenly turned hostile.  (US Committee for Refugees 1999)

Here we raise two main questions to highlight the relevance of a sense of home to those forced to flee because of war or conflict or to those caught in the (often) harsh circumstances of economic migration:

(i)   How does dislocation from home, arising from economic factors or threats to safety, affect basic human needs for identity, recognition, participation, and autonomy?

(ii)  What are the issues involved in providing protection, restoring a sense of safety, to people who have fled from war or conflict zones?

Sense of home and basic human needs

We have employed the concept of home somewhat interchangeably with the notion of sense of place, to denote, in Hobsbawm’s sense, the adult social construction of a place of attachment (the German Heimat). (Hobsbawm in Mack 1993: 62-63).  There is a significant literature on this topic in the fields of environmental psychology and urban planning and architecture, although within this body of work there has been no study, to the best we could find, of refugees or internally displaced peoples in Africa.[3]   (See Box 3.3)  What stands out from this literature is that a sense of home, and a sense of place, is considered a most important buttress to the human sense of identity and “rootedness” in the world, a crucial constant across all cultures that have been examined.  This sense of place appears to rest on human attachment to specific physical surroundings, to the relational groups he or she has established in that place through time, and/or to the memories carried throughout life reflecting back on that place, and time.  For those scholars whose focus is the West, insights from Proust figure prominently.  It is noted that for many cultures, Western and non-Western, this concept is recounted with more depth and elaboration in fiction, memoir, and poetry than in the social sciences. 

Another important observation is that this sense of home, or of place identity, is sometimes more discernible in its absence, since it usually exists as a “background awareness” in the human psyche that we  (as holders of this awareness and as observers of it) tend not to be able to envision or describe until it has been torn away.  Once bereft of home, individuals or groups may cling even more tenaciously to their sense of roots and elaborations thereupon, or may experience grave and enduring difficulty in establishing another, adequately authentic notion of who they are and where they came from.  A noted urban planner wrote of the U.S. experience with home:

In childhood we form deep attachments to the location in which we grew up and carry the image of this place with us for the remainder of our lives.  Features of the childhood place have been shown to influence many later decisions—where to live or how to arrange the home, for example. . . . In old age, as active social links fall away, we are notoriously dependent on the stability of our physical surroundings.  An abrupt move can literally kill an aged person unless it is carefully prepared for and softened by the carriage of personal property and the maintenance of social ties.  (Lynch 1984:277)

The difficulty in re-establishing one’s identity and sense of home is often exacerbated in the setting of war, invasion, or forced migration by disruption of community connection, loss or confiscation of identity papers, destruction of civil records of property ownership and vital registration data, and separation of families.  A recurring theme among refugees in the Balkans is their ongoing sorrow that family photographs and other memorabilia have been destroyed.  Efforts at family reunification in Rwanda post-genocide have been hampered by the fact that many of the separated children were abandoned or taken from their families at pre-verbal ages, and they now cannot tell social service authorities who they are or where they came from.  The durability of losses like these can be seen in the stories now accompanying the brief family reunifications allowed 50 years after the Korean War. 

The consequences of losing this buttress to identity, this sense of being rooted in the world, are variously examined in the sociological and clinical literature on grief and loss:[4] depression, anxiety, difficulty concentrating, difficulty planning for the future, restlessness, inability to form stable relationships, inability to trust.  Many studies of refugees in camps have noted increased levels of depression and high incidence of

post-traumatic stress, but these assessments are addressing a wide array of losses and traumatic experiences, of which loss of home or dislocation is only one.  A particularly thoughtful account that attempted to get at the more discrete mental health consequences of dislocation noted:

The common consequences of dislocation include impoverishment, malnutrition, increased morbidity, dependency, and the breakdown of community norms and mutual support systems.  Dam and resettlement projects mean not only a loss of home and identity that comes from a sense of place; they can obliterate generations of practical cultural knowledge and effort. . . . (Desjarlais et al 1995:138)

In the context of refugees from political violence, this study also suggested that “anger regarding separation from one’s homeland to be one of the strongest and most widespread responses” [and agreed with Eisenbruch] “to propose recognition of the phenomenon of ‘cultural bereavement’ as a discrete diagnostic condition. (ibid:142).  In this vein, despite all the difficulties of realization and enforcement, there is an internationally recognized value to the right not to be moved, and the right to go home.  As Weiner notes, quoting Mrs. Ogata from a 1993 speech: ‘The right to remain, and the right to return home in safety and dignity, must be given equal importance with the right to seek asylum.’  (Weiner 1995:165.)

Much work lies ahead to identify the psychosocial implications for people who are forced to leave home, or whose homes and possessions are destroyed; or who must construct a welcome and integration into societies new to them.  One major general finding in the literature is that dislocation increases one’s likelihood of depression, anxiety, fear, and, depending on circumstances of resettlement, learned helplessness.  (Desjarlais:141)  Whatever further generalizations might be made would have to be modified for particular cultures and historical contexts.  Yet despite the absence of much empirical information, it is clear from the work to date that attachment to home or place has myriad connections to the psychosocial capacity of individuals and groups to weather and adapt to flight, dislocation, and forced migration.

Protection of populations (home as a safe place)

Fundamental to sense of home and location is the certainty that once home, one is safe.  In Amoo’s list of basic human needs, he included security in the context of security from attack, or safety in the face of hostile forces.  We have chosen to situate this discussion of physical security in the category relating to home, because in our view safety is a core attribute of any definition of home as well as being necessary to any more general concept of human security.

Threats to physical safety and well being are prominent characteristics of forced flight from home and temporary settlement in refugee camps or as IDPs.  Flight exposes individuals and groups to great risk of fear, hunger, exhaustion, dehydration, disease, attack, robbery, torture, sexual assault, kidnap, and death.  Temporary settlement, without adequate safeguards, creates its own risks.  Seen in this way, flight is not a benign option and when undertaken constitutes one of the more immediate and hazardous aspects of civilian response to war.

Traditional norms of population protection, enshrined in the Geneva Conventions, are flouted routinely in today’s conflicts.  Many irregular armed forces are entirely ignorant of the Conventions or its terms.  Further, in these communal wars when combatants specifically target civilians as part of their war aims, the combatants perceive the Geneva Conventions as not merely irrelevant but as impediments to their strategic pursuit.  The consequences for civilians are many and far-reaching, including breakdown in all methods to protect civilians from assault and serious violations of medical neutrality, mistreatment of prisoners, and interference with delivery of humanitarian aid.

A further complexity is that the duration of these conflicts, and the ongoing humanitarian involvement of the international community, imposes a longer time frame for population protection than that initially envisioned in the Geneva Conventions.  Cessation of formal military hostilities does not bring an end to the expectation and the need for the international community to maintain order, provide humanitarian assistance, and protect stigmatized groups from reprisal.  This humanitarian time frame, determined by imperatives of public order and public health, creates for itself a much more complex political terrain.  Not only are tenets of international humanitarian law active in these settings but also the norms of international human rights.  As noted recently in a discussion of these issues for a predominantly medical audience:

Children need caring adults; terrified refugees need to be able to feel safe; people from diverse cultures seek respectful space for religious practice; women in camps should not be forced into prostitution.  (Bruderlein and Leaning 1999)

Protection in today’s terms thus brings with it the requirement to attend to the human rights and dignity of the affected populations.  (ICRC 1998)

A key issue in recent discussions that relate to human security is how the international community can protect targeted populations, trapped or internally displaced, without resort to force.  In addition to a number of preventive activities, such as diplomatic efforts to settle disputes peacefully, early warning mechanisms attached to diplomatic pressures, or humanitarian initiatives to supply essential life supports, several suggestions for the creation of “safety zones” within countries have been advanced.  (Weiner 1995:164)

For these to prove effective, however, either the warring parties must respect the provisions of the Geneva Conventions that affirm the neutral and protected status of civilians, or the international community must be prepared to use military force to establish viable parameters of protected areas. (Bruderlein and Leaning 1999)   A suggested list of principles to use in determining whether force may or may not be necessary to ensure population protection has been elaborated recently. (Bruderlein 1998)   The key point is that if agreement between the warring parties cannot be reliably established and monitored, or if the conflict is essentially based on ethnic antagonisms (where such agreements tend to break down at once), adequate population protection cannot be assured without the introduction of substantive armed force.

Much of the responsibility for establishing a sense of safety for people who have been forced to flee from war has fallen on the NGO community and international agencies like UNHCR, whose functions are constrained by mandate and capacities.  When external force is not required to cement an agreement between warring parties, it is possible to introduce measures that can provide substantial relief from fear and abuse:  humanitarian corridors for delivery of medical care and transport of humanitarian aid; delivery of targeted relief assistance at key times and locations; arranging for the safe exit of a population trapped by hostilities.  When states have seen the need to intervene, either under Chapter 6 or Chapter 7 mandates, the results, in terms of population protection, have been mixed.  There is still no international consensus on how to define thresholds of risk linked to escalation strategies for intervention.

Negative indicator:  Social dislocation

War and economic forces can cause marked social dislocation when they force people to leave established social ties and familiar territory or travel long distances, often to wind up at a destination but never then to truly settle down.  We introduce here the concept of social dislocation as representing a potentially measurable aspect of threat to this domain of human security (a sense of home).  An example that has been analyzed from this perspective, the Ghana Volta River Project, suggests the long-term political and economic consequences of moving people against their will.  (See Box 3.4)

Psychosocial domain #2 – Sense of Community

The importance of community in sustaining the psychosocial components of human security cannot be overstated.  Human beings are social animals, each individual forging links to other people in an expanding circle of relationships formed as he or she matures.  Through interacting with others, an individual expands his or her own perceptions, develops a system of moral values, finds emotional support, and builds the reasons to continue to stay attached to life.  An abiding tenet in anthropology, sociology, and psychology is that action of people in groups, whether competitive or cooperative, has created culture, economic livelihood, and historical meaning for every society that has ever lived on earth. (Marris 1991)

Catastrophes such as war and disaster, inflicting near or total loss of community, have been found to have serious long-lasting psychosocial effects.  A classic study of the obliteration of settlement in the Buffalo Creek flood in West Virginia in 1972 revealed that the community itself had become a casualty, constituting a “collective trauma:”

By collective trauma, I mean a blow to the tissues of social life that damages the bonds linking people together and impairs the prevailing sense of communality.  . . .  a gradual realization that the community no longer exists as a source of nurturance and that a part of the self has disappeared. (Erikson 1975:302)

Analysts of current complex emergencies are concerned with the effects of loss of community but even more so, from a conflict prevention perspective, with what makes apparent communities unravel or come apart.  A question of abiding concern relates to identifying those factors that disrupt what appear to be stable and compensated relationships between and among groups, and serve as predisposing, instigating, or sustaining factors in inter-group conflict.  A number of variables have been suggested:  sudden shifts in relative status; exposure to outside norms; or glimpses of release in the midst of unremitting oppression.  These are suggested with the recognition of the contextual importance of chronic material deprivation.  Friedman (1999) and others have described how easily the economically dispossessed can turn to ideological protest and group conflict.[5]   But there is also the growing consensus, reached by recent case reviews of current wars and conflicts, that poverty alone, or even income inequality alone, is not a predictor of conflict. (Collier 1999, Elbadawi and Sambanis 2000, International Peace Academy 1999).

Dynamic changes in economics, politics, demography

In terms of economic factors, dynamic changes in qualitative or conditions can prompt people to action.  As discussed in the setting of community development in the West, Peter Marris notes that people “are open to choosing differently from their habit” when:

the rewards and punishments change; when, for instance, inflation or economic disaster rob the prudent and conforming of their lifetime’s savings; when conscientious and thoughtful voters find that the people they elected are contemptuous and corrupt; when behavior, once repressed, acquires legitimacy or consistently escapes sanctions.  And, perhaps even more than in those circumstances, people have to choose afresh when the ideological confusion of society, the weakness of government and unpredictability of events makes it harder to know what conformity is, or what may be rewarded or punished.  (Marris 1987:153)

Individuals and groups can also be roused to hostile thought and action when their economic or political circumstances suddenly change for the worse or when their circumstances relative to others appear not to be improving.  In foreshadowing the turbulent consequences of rising expectations, Charles Dickens put it well:

In the hunted air of the people there was yet some wild-beast thought of the possibility of turning at bay.  Depressed and slinking though they were, eyes of fire were not wanting among them; nor compressed lips, white with what they suppressed. . . . For, the time was to come, when the gaunt scarecrows of that region should have watched the lamplighter, in their idleness and hunger, so long, as to conceive the idea of improving on his method, and hauling up men by those ropes and pulleys, to flare upon the darkness of their condition. But, the time was not come yet, and every wind that blew over France shook the rags of the scarecrows in vain, for the birds, fine of song and feather, took no warning.  (Dickens 1970:61-62)

In a study of the relationship between demographic trends and national security, Brian Nichiporuk notes how ‘ecological marginalization’ can contribute to social conflict.  He finds that demographic pressures on the land can result in a decline in productivity and intensify effects of existing property ownership laws:

The farming of these barren tracts will usually create increasing rates of environmental damage to the region as a whole, leading to a vicious downward cycle of productivity and opportunity in which the lower classes of a developing agricultural country can survive only by damaging the local ecosystem.  Fierce resentment against the elite groups that support the property laws that guarantee the continuation of this marginalization of lower socioeconomic classes can cause an upsurge in social violence and, in extreme cases, even lead to the creation of an organized insurgency that aims to destroy the existing order completely.  (Nichiporuk 1999:46-47)

The historical literature on popular forms of social protest in Africa may also prove relevant to an analysis of current ways in which inter-group conflict is now taking place in many parts of the continent.  Case studies and evolving theories about the role of peasants and their leaders, in settings as diverse as late 17^th century Ghana and early 20^th century Tanzania, suggest important linkages between criminality and social resistance, and these linkages may be applicable today.  Historians describe factors such as rural-urban dynamics, inherited class relationships, pressure on the land, and resistance to externally imposed authorities that fed a broad spectrum of popular protest activities, ranging from banditry to revolution.  (Crummey 1986, Allen and Williams 1982)  Understanding conflicts in Africa within that framework helps to identify patterns of leadership and recruitment, as well as to recognize issues with the potential to provoke unrest.

The influence of ethnicit

These economic, political, or demographic variables, whether arising from internal or external sources, can seriously aggravate underlying ethnic or communal tensions.  The role of ethnicity in its relationship to inter-group conflict has been analyzed by Eileen Babbitt as hinging on changes in “structural issues” that can exacerbate ethnic divides.  She describes them to include:

. . . competition and inequality among groups which can result in real or perceived disparities in privileges and access to political and economic resources.  They may also come from new or continuing forms of discrimination whereby access to political or economic advancement is systematically blocked or one’s group is actively persecuted, including prohibitions on the use of language, religion, or other cultural practices that are different from those of the dominant group. (Babbitt 1999:342)

Psychological issues active in the community or society are equally important, in Babbitt’s view, in aggravating or sustaining ethnic tensions.  She describes the role of threat and fear, the ways in which groups can be manipulated or incited by leaders, and has a particularly chilling view of the longer-term social consequences (read human security implications) once ethnic tensions explode into open hostilities and violence.  In her review of recent experience, “strong ethnic and other intergroup conflict” can cause:

potential long-term problems because it poisons the political and social environment.  Once the ‘other side’ has been vilified and dehumanized, as so readily happens in such conflicts, it is difficult to reverse the process psychologically and politically. The ‘us versus them’ mentality is often institutionalized in the state structures. . .  . The enormous challenge then becomes not only restructuring such institutions, but also changing the attitude and relationship between the conflicting groups.  (ibid.: 340)

As Bernard Kouchner has noted with real asperity, after a year as special representative of the UN Secretary General in Kosovo and despite a vigorous effort to reform institutions and introduce the rule of law, he is still “unable to stop people from being massacred.” (Kouchner quoted in Ignatieff 2000).

Vulnerability introduced by change

Fred Cuny has observed that in disaster situations “high vulnerability is often a direct result of people’s desire for modernity” and that “those who have begun to seek a change in their social and economic status are least equipped to deal with calamity” (Cuny 1994: 4).  At such critical junctures people rely on established systems of emotional, social and economic support to carry them through.  Those in the process of leaving old networks or building new ones are relatively more vulnerable to isolation or marginalization when threatened by extreme circumstances.

This recognition that different groups are differentially vulnerable and respond in different ways to threats or shocks to their equilibrium goes back to Smith, Ricardo and Marx.  It is at the center of any analysis, economic or otherwise, that attempts to explain internal conflict.  Although it is understood that elite groups play a key role in initiating power struggles and manipulating support groups (Brown 1996), it is also evident that ‘followers’ take sides in a conflict for clear and identifiable reasons.  In other words, all groups in populations are like elites insofar as they respond to private incentives for legal or non-legal behavior, and insofar as the balance of incentives they face depends on the nature and extent of opportunities available to them--economic, social, political or otherwise.  The broad concept of human security developed here will thus rest on identifying those individual capabilities and social relationships that successfully promote individual and group resilience and coping in the face of rapid changes in relational equilibrium or external circumstances.  The task from the perspective of community disruption is to identify the types of tension that are potentially destabilizing;  the changes in environment, circumstance or relationships that introduce those tensions; and the different groups likely to be involved in or affected by such destabilizations, along with what they each stand to win or lose.  (Rieff 1997, Anderson 1999, Hinde and Pulkinnen 2000)  

Negative indicator:  Dynamic inequality between group

In assessing the disruption of community that occurs in the setting of the crises and transitions now confronting many regions of the world, the concept of ‘dynamic inequality’ may be particularly useful.  Infusion of resources, or interventions that upset prevailing inter-group dynamics, can exacerbate fundamental community ties – often manifesting itself in the form of ‘horizontal inequality’.  (Stewart 1998; see Box 3.5)

Psychosocial domain #3 - Positive sense of the Future

Human security, to the extent that it is grounded on psychological and social factors, is closely linked to a sense of continuity of these factors through time.  Implicit and central to an individual’s positive meaning of identity, recognition, participation, and autonomy are:

a)   the consciousness of strengths that one has acquired from an individual and shared past, and

b)   the confidence that one’s own capacities, and the external social and political structures that confer meaning and stability, will persist for some indefinite period into the future.

This consciousness and this confidence have been wrested from millions of people displaced and devastated by recent catastrophes and war. 

Uses of the Past

We include in the overall discussion of time a recognition of what meaning people attach to the past.  A strong historical sense might hold a community together under stress, but might also be the vehicle through which grievance and conflict are perpetuated.  In the context of communal and ethnic antagonisms, Volkan and Itzkowitz describe the notion of a “chosen trauma” as an event that:

invokes in the members of one group intense feelings of having been humiliated and victimized by members of another group.  A group does not, of course ‘choose’ to be victimized and, subsequently, to lose self-esteem, but it does ‘choose’ to psychologize and mythologize—to dwell on the event . . . . Once a trauma becomes a chosen trauma, the historical truth about it does not really matter.  (Volkan and Itzkowitz, quoted in Babbitt 1999: 341)

The important point in terms of human security is how and when does commitment to one’s group become “a focus of self-destructive hatred – an internal disease that interferes with eventual reconciliation.”   (Apfel and Simon 1996:14)    In this paper, we have embedded the question of time as it relates to uses of the past in the previous section.  In that context, negative uses of the past, feeding communal antagonisms, augment and contribute to inter-group inequalities, the inverse measure of human security for community.

Uncertainty about the Future

Here we focus on time as it relates to uncertainty about the future.  Perceptions about the future range considerably depending upon one’s age, life experience, and belief systems and have enormous implications for how people think about their lives and make choices in the present.  The factors we highlight here are economic deprivation and experience of traumatic events.  Both of these factors pertain to large numbers of people affected by crisis and protracted conflict in Africa.

Impoverishment and deprivation constrict one’s span of control, one’s options, one’s capacity to command or direct resources.  Marris underscores this concern when speaking of the “cumulative burden of uncertainty” that people at the bottom of social hierarchies are required to endure:

At every level of government or economic organization, people seek to displace the uncertainties of their situation on to others. . . .